A string theorist’s comments

Today I had a lovely dinner at my friend’s. There were three string theorist (if you include me), one biologist, one composer, and one musician. The composer was talking about numbers that composers are obsessed of and explained how music are built upon it. She told us Bach’s number is 14, Mozart is 25. This means that Bach tried to make his music based on 14, like 14 minutes long and so on. It was quite amazing to see that actually a artist is obsessed with numbers! I thought numbers were a trademark of number theorists. I even found that the obsession in numbers of composers were more like a religion! Her number was 2 and 3, so everything she composed was based upon 2 and 3.

Anyway, the conversation somehow evolved in to gravitation, and my string theorist friend was trying to explain Einstein’s theory to the composer. He did really well in explaining the concept of inertial frames and the nature of gravitation, with the classic example of the free-falling elevator. I was so impressed with his skills of explaining ideas to a layman. Eventually, he was explaining Newtonian gravitation and unexpectedly looked at me and said.

So in Newton’s theory the gravitation goes like, I am not sure, hmm… was it 1 over r^2? Or something like that?

Suddenly, I felt that maybe string theory is not about physics after all!

~ by hwasungmars on December 16, 2007.